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This chapter demonstrates that Immanuel Wallerstein's reluctance to apply the concepts, "core" and "periphery," to precapitalist transformations is a product of the way he views the luxury trade. The distinction between periphery and external arena rests upon the conceptual separation of essential from luxury exchanges. The chapter argues that the alternative interpretation will prepare the way for future analyses of precapitalist events within a theoretical framework consistent with Wallerstein's analysis of Russia and Poland. According to Wallerstein, the capitalist world-system differs from all previous imperiums, which he describes as world-empires. Precapitalist tribute systems at first glance give the impression that reliance upon luxury goods for the creation and maintenance of allies was indiscriminate. Textiles figure importantly in Wallerstein's account of numerous precapitalist events. The chapter proposes that thinking about a precapitalist world-system will help clarify the Western intellectual tendency to drive a wedge between necessities and luxuries; the same wedge that separates God from the Devil.

The ambiguity of the concept of crime is evident in the two strands of anthropological research covered in this review. One strand, the anthropology of criminalization, explores how state authorities, media, and citizen discourse define particular groups and practices as criminal, with prejudicial consequences. Examples are drawn from research on peasant rebellion, colonialism, youth, and racially or ethnically marked urban poor. The other strand traces ethnographic work on more or less organized illegal and predatory activity: banditry, rustling, trafficking, street gangs, and mafias. Although a criminalizing perspective tends to conflate these diverse forms of “organized” crime, in particular erasing the boundary between street gangs and drug trafficking, the forms have discrete histories and motivations. Their particularities, as well as their historical interactions, illuminate everyday responses to crime and suggest ways to put in perspective the “crime talk” of today, which borders on apocalyptic.

Substantial changes have transformed Sicily over the forty years that we have known it as anthropological fieldworkers. This essay draws particular attention to the appearance of industrial age technologies and related modernizing trends; to a dramatic decline in fertility with effects on family life and civic culture; and to the emergence of an antimafia social movement demanding effective police and juridical restraint of organized crime. It further considers what in retrospect were blind spots in our research, in particular our earlier understandings of the long-term viability of the Sicilian Left and of the organization and regional coherence of the Mafia. The passage of time raises new questions and produces new frameworks for analysis. Based on our recent research in Palermo, we attempt to assess the prospects for the Mafia and antimafia process in Sicily.

In the immediate aftermath of September 11, we circulated an essay outlining possible comparisons between the 1980s and 1990s repression of organized crime in Italy and Sicily and the pending repression of the al-Qaeda network. Distributed in several countries, and as a contribution to the Anthropological Quarterly's reflections on September 11, the essay elicited critical and provocative commentary. Respondents questioned, in particular, our neglect of abuses of civil liberties in the antimafia process, our implied conflation of racketeering with religious extremism, and our positive assessment of the role of citizens' social movements in delegitimating terrorist violence. In this article, we address these and related criticisms, in part through expanding and clarifying the original argument. Our premise at the time, that the rhetoric (and pursuit) of a "war" on terrorism distorts what should be framed as a repressive action against a cellular and networked, violent and secretive organization, is reinforced. [Keywords: criminal networks, mafia, social movements, Cold War, revenge]

Although not ideologically driven, the Sicilian mafia is a secretive organization whose "families" nurture violence. Moreover, after the breakup of the French Connection, in the context of Sicily's becoming a crossroads of global narcotics trafficking, this violence turned terroristic, with a rising toll of assassinations and increasing resort to bombings directed against the state. The massacres of the Palermo Prefect Carlo Alberto dalla Chiesa in 1982, and the heroic prosecutors Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino in 1992, provoked waves of especially intense reaction-high points in a multi-faceted lotto contro la mafia-"struggle against the mafia." Having observed, first hand, the emergence of Palermo since 1982 as an internationally recognized center of experiments in civility and legality, we are encouraged to sketch a few elements of that struggle which might be helpful in thinking about the encounter with terrorist organizations that lies ahead. One is the value of attending to the police and juridical aspects of the struggle in order to support ethical and intelligent prosecutors and reasonably evaluate their requests for broader investigative powers. Prosecutions in Sicily have depended upon several innovations, most of which derive from a national law of 1982 defining active membership in the mafia as itself a crime. Measures to legitimate the testimony of cooperating witnesses if corroborated by other evidence, and to provide these "pentiti" with a witness protection program, have also been central, as have stiffer sentencing practices after 1992. With these instruments, investigators and prosecutors have "turned" witnesses, followed money trails, located fugitives, and mapped the contours of the organization. Many Italians have questioned the new laws, fearing that their misuse could threaten civil liberties. Controversy also surrounds the 1980s decision to try mafiosi in a specially constructed courthouse in a mass trial. Yet the antimafia prosecutors (a number of whom have been assassinated) for the most part enjoy wide public support and are, in turn, highly sensitive to organized attempts to delegitimate their efforts. (This had also been true of the prosecutors of ultra-left and ultra-right political terrorism in Italy in the 1970s.) A Palermo-centered citizens' social movement-the movimento antimafia-- has sustained the police-judicial suppression of the mafia since 1982. Catalyzed into mass demonstrations and vigils by the episodes of terror, this movement persists at a less dramatic level through on-going volunteer work and consciousness raising. For example, activists dedicate time and energy to antimafia projects in the public schools, and to everyday attempts to further an antimafia consciousness in their workplaces, professions, churches, and unions. What is worth appreciating about this movement is that the women and men who participate in it share both location and history with the mafia. Committed to the antimafia struggle, they are also loyal to their Sicilian identity, and in some cases burdened by a past of ambiguous social relations with mafia members. The resulting moral anguish has been the more troubling because, in the wider world, "Sicilians" are so often treated as a stigmatized category. It matters that this wider world has paid attention, that the northern Italian and European media have acknowledged and respected the various strands of antimafia commitment in Sicily. Citizens' movements against violence will emerge-have already emerged-- in many Muslim countries and in Muslim immigrant and exile communities around the world. These movements are not only essential to the struggle against Al Qaeda and related organizations. Recognizing them and crediting them can help to contradict stereotypic representations of Muslims as extremists in Western popular discourse and, in turn, ease the burden that Muslim anti-terrorists bear. Significantly, the antimafia struggle in Sicily challenged the Italian state for having harbored, aided and comforted, the mafia. …

Based on fieldwork in Palermo, this article analyzes the city’s antimafia movement in which the words ‘civil society’ have ample resonance. On the one hand, they convey an ecumenical meaning, suited to overcoming the otherwise polarized Communist and Christian Democratic political identities that anti-mafia activists inherited from the Cold War era. On the other hand, they evoke cultural hegemony, exemplified by antimafia initiatives in the public schools. To understand the contemporary currency of ‘civil society’, the article argues, requires revisiting the Cold War years when the overt and covert exercise of political violence not only impeded the formation of democratic institutions, but made a mockery of such institutions where they existed. Social movements emerging from that era often make rhetorical use of the civil society concept as an umbrella under which to demand transparency, democracy, and human rights. Coincidentally, civil society discourse has acquired enormous currency with the United Nations, the IMF and World Bank, and a vast array of nongovernmental organizations. At this level, the issue is the marginalization of new global enemies, no less threatening than the (Soviet) ‘evil empire’ - specifically, the uncivil forces of crime and corruption that, under the post-Cold War conditions of triumphant neo-liberal capitalism, can only grow and thrive if not held in check.

AT A SPECIAL WORKSHOP held in the fall of 1994, we gathered to discuss the rapid growth of interest in European ethnography and ethnology, especially since the foundation of the Society for the Anthropology of Europe in 1986, and its implications for the larger development of anthropological theory. 1 After the deliberations, each of us developed the position paper originally formulated for that initial encounter. The texts that follow are the result. They claim neither thematic nor theoretical unity, but they do suggest that the refocusing of anthropological interest on one of the discipline's cultural contexts of emergence, coupled with the geopolitical shifts of the past decade, may have contributed to a reconsideration of the role of social and cultural anthropology in the formulation of a social theory. In one sense the "anthropologizing" of Europe was a necessary methodological counterpart to the dethronement of Europe as the fount of all wisdom. But what, for those who still (or for the first time) claim it as their identity and home, is Europe? We offer these brief ruminations

Religious conservatism has long regarded premarital sex and sex for reasons other than conception to be sacrilegious. Accordingly many in countries throughout the world both presently and in the past have engaged in sexual activity without taking contraceptive measures out of fear for retribution from religious institutions or because religious influences have effectively made preventive methods unavailable to the public. Despite these oft-accepted doctrine-based preconditions for engaging in sexual relations people have used condoms since before the nineteenth century to protect themselves against sexually transmitted diseases. Coitus interruptus however supplemented by abortion and abstinence was the main mode of preventing unwanted pregnancies until the spread of estrogen pills in the 1960s. Together they helped reduce total fertility in western Europe from 7-8 to 2-3 over the period 1870-1960. This paper discusses how the practice of coitus interruptus was reinterpreted in the late nineteenth century to represent virtue and restraint instead of licentiousness and encouraging of sexuality. Further it explains how these ideological and practical transitions occurred in a socially-stratified birth-controlling population in West Central rural Sicily over the period 1900-70. The gentry and artisans were first to embrace coitus interruptus and were followed by the peasants. This sequential pattern and the transition from high to low fertility are consistent with late twentieth century interpretations of coitus interruptus by Foucault and others as sexually restraining yet empowering. Adopting the practice enhanced access to respectability in a context of economic and cultural change. Moreover those who adopted the practice increasingly stigmatized other high-parity couples as being out of control of their sexual instincts and unworthy of respect.

The authors discuss historical fertility developments among the working classes (braccianti) in the rural town of Villamaura Sicily. "Based on retrospective interviews and a survey of material culture we portray the braccianti during the inter-war years as at least temporarily trapped in a fertility regime which added to the misery of both men and women although for different reasons. Our interpretation of this process questions the proposition that large birth parities during this difficult time resulted from rational choice. But rather than attribute the large parities to a fatalist or traditional mindset we specify the life-circumstances that obstructed a collective bracciante response to unwanted high fertility at least until well after World War II." (EXCERPT)

Managing Existence in Naples: Morality, Action and Structure. Italo Pardo. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. xvi. 232 pp., maps, notes, references, index. Gender, Family and Work in Naples. Victoria A. Goddard. Oxford: Berg, 1996. + 264 pp., appendixes, bibliography, index.

Cloth spans many categories of human want and need. Modem machine­ manufacturers distinguish apparel for the body from the coverings of walls and furniture, and from such "industrial" products as storage bags and filters. Hand-made cloth supplies equally varied domains. Within each domain, moreover, some fabrics meet practical exigencies while others communicate meanings or express artistic taste. In historical complex societies, several cloth traditions coexisted, from the domestic weaving of rural populations to court and urban industries. Contemporary complex societies show a similar range as home workers and cooperatives coexist with factories. In this essay, I review the role of cloth consumption in the consolidation of social relations and in the expression of social identities and values. I also attempt to relate cloth production to the mobilization of power by such units of social action as classes, dynasties, cities, religious institutions, and ethnic and gender sodali­ ties. That cloth is relevant to power is suggested by the relationship of stylistic change to political and economic shifts. Some understandings of style obscure this link, in particular the ones that view style as the homogeneous and uncontested expression of a discrete culture's worldview, or as propelled by its own logic-for example a tension between representational and geometric patterning. My approach is instead continuous with that of the art historian Meyer Schapiro, whose essay on style Kroeber included in Anthropology Today. According to Schapiro, political and economic shifts in great transre­ gional systems of interaction "are often accompanied or followed by shifts in the centers of art and their styles. Religion and major worldviews are broadly coordinated with these eras in social history" (194:310). To explore this

This paper relates color symbolism in European dress to the historical geography of textile manufacturing and dyeing, dating back to the Middle Ages. Its central concern is the widespread use of black, not only as a color of mourning, but also as a mode for communicating religious and political goals. Black clothing, it is argued, constituted both a practical and a symbolic means of resisting the luxury, polychrome fabrics that older and more developed civilizations of the eastern Mediterranean exported. Although beautiful and tempting, these textiles were instruments of hegemony, for they were produced under monopoly conditions furthered by the highly uneven world distribution of dyestuffs. In Europe they commanded basic resources — slaves and bullion — in exchange and thus created an unequal balance of trade. Black cloth, which contributed in many different ways first to arrest and then to reverse this imbalance, was a totally indigenous product that native craftsmen manufactured and brought to perfection using native raw materials. As such, it had something in common with contemporary symbols of national liberation, perhaps even when it called attention to death.